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Troubling the boundaries: "blacknesses," performance, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s

TROUBLING THE BOUNDARIES: “BLACKNESSES,” PERFORMANCE AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE OF THE 1960S
by
Carol Bunch Davis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Carol Bunch Davis

In its analysis of four plays staged between 1959 and 1969, Troubling the Boundaries: 'Blacknesses' Performance and The African American Freedom Struggle asks how the performance of visual and textual "blackness" in these works mediate, rehearse, and constitute multiple black identities or "blacknesses" in dialogue with the social and political upheaval of the African-American Freedom Struggle and traces how they inform the discourse of race during this historical era. The project demonstrates how the deployment of blackness as a performative strategy in these four sites of performance produces multiple "blacknesses" and resists the notion of a monolithic "blackness" circulating in both cultural and sociopolitical milieus during this period.; Attentive to a "master narrative" of the 1960s that limits the Civil Rights Movement to Dr. Martin Luther King's work in Selma and Montgomery and casts Malcolm X and the Black Power and Black Arts Movements as disloyal to calls for integration and nonviolent protest, this project contends that the expressive culture of the period troubles such a narrative. Instead, Troubling the Boundaries draws attention to the ways in which "blacknesses" are constructed at multiples sites within a matrix of social relations, as well as economic, political, and social issues that foreground how race intersects with class, gender, sexuality, and region to complicate black identity.; Considering works written, performed, and directed African-American cultural producers and theatre critics' responses to them in popular media outlets, the project analyzes "cultural crisscrossings" and how they comment upon, revise, and reinscribe notions of black identity through and between boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, and region. Employing mixed methods including film, theatre and performance theory alongside African-American literary and cultural theory the project investigates the construction of blackness and black identity across genres. In its analysis of texts that are not anthologized, revisiting those texts that are, and reexamining those positioned as representative of the period, this dissertation complicates notions of African-American identity in the 1960s and speculates on that era's currency in the present historical moment.

TROUBLING THE BOUNDARIES: “BLACKNESSES,” PERFORMANCE AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE OF THE 1960S
by
Carol Bunch Davis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Carol Bunch Davis